Advancing a Radical Audience Turn in Journalism:Fundamental Dilemmas for Journalism Studies

Despite its increasing attention for audiences, journalism studies remains an inherently production-focused discipline. Consequently, studying the perspective of audiences tends to automatically start from questions relevant for and benefitting the news industry. In this introduction, we argue for a more radical audience turn that pushes journalism studies forward beyond normative and industry concerns, and starts from the perspective of audiences themselves. We formulate four constructive starting points for advancing the audience turn in journalism: 1) further decentering journalism by also focusing on non-news and employing non-media centric approaches; 2) broadening who counts as audience by including audiences considered commercially unattractive; 3) shifting the focus from what counts as news use to what is experienced as informative; and 4) positing audiences as active agents. However, such a radical audience turn also creates fundamental dilemmas for journalism studies, raising questions about the field’s object of study, the spaces and contexts of news use considered, and the objectives of journalism studies as a field. With this special issue, we call for further reflections on how news and informational needs may be conceptualized from an audience perspective and how to theorize what this means for journalism’s role in society and everyday life

How People Integrate News into Their Everyday Routines:A Context-Centered Approach to News Habits

This article uses the notion of habit to explore how news users adopt a new subscription into their everyday routines, and identifies facilitators and obstacles helping or inhibiting this process. Sixty-eight participants received a three-week newspaper trial subscription and were interviewed about their experiences afterward. Facilitators of repeated use were concurrent rewards; embedment into existing routines; and visual reminders. Obstacles were lack of steady routines; strong existing habits; perceived effort; disillusionment; and accessibility. Findings point to the importance of visibility: participants–even those with positive initial experiences–tended to forget their subscription. Visual cues were needed to remind participants to read their subscription: app icons, open browser tabs, social media posts, push notifications, and the print newspaper. Proactive implementation of these cues suggests participants themselves were also aware of their propensity to forget the subscription. Existing (news) habits either helped anchor use of the subscription or blocked it by being automatically cued up by context features. Results also point to a mental hurdle: having to muster up the cognitive and motivational energy to start reading the news. Finally, findings suggest that concurrently experienced rewards may be more conducive to news habit formation than retrospectively experienced rewards

How People Integrate News into Their Everyday Routines: A Context-Centered Approach to News Habits

This article uses the notion of habit to explore how news users adopt a new subscription into their everyday routines, and identifies facilitators and obstacles helping or inhibiting this process. Sixty-eight participants received a three-week newspaper trial subscription and were interviewed about their experiences afterward. Facilitators of repeated use were concurrent rewards; embedment into existing routines; and visual reminders. Obstacles were lack of steady routines; strong existing habits; perceived effort; disillusionment; and accessibility. Findings point to the importance of visibility: participants–even those with positive initial experiences–tended to forget their subscription. Visual cues were needed to remind participants to read their subscription: app icons, open browser tabs, social media posts, push notifications, and the print newspaper. Proactive implementation of these cues suggests participants themselves were also aware of their propensity to forget the subscription. Existing (news) habits either helped anchor use of the subscription or blocked it by being automatically cued up by context features. Results also point to a mental hurdle: having to muster up the cognitive and motivational energy to start reading the news. Finally, findings suggest that concurrently experienced rewards may be more conducive to news habit formation than retrospectively experienced rewards

Why people don’t pay for news:A qualitative study

Getting users to pay for news remains a key challenge in journalism. With advertising revenues dwindling, news organizations have become increasingly dependent on reader revenue. This paper explores reasons news users have for not paying for (print and digital) news. 68 participants tried a free three-week newspaper trial subscription and afterward were interviewed about their considerations for (not) getting a paid subscription. Participants had four main reasons not to pay for news: price, sufficient freely available news, not wanting to commit oneself, and delivery and technical issues. A key finding is that digital entertainment subscriptions like Netflix and Spotify seemed central to how younger participants thought about paying for news. Another finding that stands out is that when referencing price, participants had a full print subscription in mind, even when their preferred subscription type was a less costly weekend-only or digital subscription. Participants also discussed future scenarios in which they might consider paying for news: a lower price, a flexible service, a one-stop for reliable news, the added value of higher quality news, and payment as a commitment device disciplining participants into actually reading the news

“It’s Catchy, but It Gets You F*cking Nowhere”: What Viewers of Current Affairs Experience as Captivating Political Information

This paper explores how political information can be told in such a way that news users experience it as captivating. More specifically, it seeks to move beyond Irene Costera Meijer’s “double viewing paradox” and bridge the gap between what attracts and satisfies viewers by developing bottom–up, user-defined, quality criteria for current affairs TV. Items from two Dutch current affairs shows were watched and discussed with fifty-four viewers. A key finding is that participants greatly appreciated feeling enabled to better understand how politics work and impact society. This suggests that what viewers want from political journalism might differ from what journalists produce yet is perfectly compatible with their democratic remit

Material and sensory dimensions of everyday news use

This article seeks to capture material and sensory dimensions of everyday news use that usually remain unexplored. To that end, we developed a two-sided-ethnography, filming people while they use news, allowing both researchers and participants to look in and reflect on their news use. Tapping into news users’ embodied, tacit knowledge, we found that the materiality of devices and platforms and the ways users physically handle and navigate them impact how they engage with news, in ways they themselves had not realized. We also deepened our understanding of previously found news user practices, and identified the distinct practice scrolling, which is characterized by an embodied urge to keep up the movement of the hand, even when the user finds content appealing. Finally, we show how people actively ‘make’ place and time through their news practices, using coping strategies that mediate between the comfortability of ritual news use and the disruptiveness of news content. We conclude by discussing the theoretical, methodological, and epistemological implications of our research, which include a call for a more in-situ, real-time, and non-news-centric approach to studying everyday news use

What clicks actually mean: Exploring digital news user practices

This article problematizes the relationship between clicks and audience interests. Clicking patterns are often seen as evidence that news users are mostly interested in junk news, leading to concerns about the state of journalism and the implications for society. Asking and observing how 56 users actually browse news and what clicking and not clicking mean to them, we identified 30 distinct considerations for (not) clicking and classified them into three categories: cognitive, affective and pragmatic. The results suggest, first, that interest is too crude a term to account for the variety of people’s considerations for (not) clicking. Second, even if one aims for roughly estimating people’s news interests, clicks are a flawed instrument because a lack of clicking does not measure people’s lack of interest in news. Third, taking users’ browsing patterns seriously could help bridge the gap between what people need as citizens and what they actually consume. Finally, we argue that all metrics should be critically assessed from a user perspective rather than taken at face value